Scope of Project

To build a single, validated and documented shared family tree for the Starbuck, Coffin, Gardner and related families, from earlier origins to near modern times

Overview

The Starbuck and Coffin families were a group of whalers operating out of Nantucket, Massachusetts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Some members of the family gained wider exposure due to their discovery of various islands in the Pacific Ocean.

General Note

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About Nantucket Island and the Whaling Industry

Whaling

The towns of Long Island are believed to have been the first to establish a Whaling|whale fishery on the shores of New England sometime around 1650. Nantucket joined in on the trade in 1690 when they sent for one Ichabod Padduck to instruct them in the methods of whaling. Starbuck (1878), p.17. The south side of the island was divided into three and a half mile sections, each one with a mast erected to look for the spouts of right whales. Each section had a temporary hut for the five men assigned to that area, with a sixth man standing watch at the mast. Once a whale was sighted, whale boats were rowed from the shore, and if the whale was successfully harpooned and lanced to death, it was towed ashore, Flensing|flensed (that is, its blubber was cut off), and the blubber boiled in cauldrons known as "trypots." Well into the 18th century, even when Nantucket sent out sailing vessels to fish for whales offshore, the whalers would still come to the shore to boil the blubber.

In 1715 Nantucket had six sloops engaged in the whale fishery, Starbuck (1878), p.20. and by 1730 it had twenty-five vessels of 38 to 50 tons employed in the trade.Starbuck (1878), p.21-22. Each vessel employed twelve to thirteen men, half of them being Native Americans in the United States|Native Americans. At times the whole crew, with the exception of the captain, might be natives. Scammon (1874), p.204. They had two whaleboats, one held in reserve should the other be damaged by an angry whale.

By 1732 the first Yankee whalers had reached the Davis Strait fishery, between Greenland and Baffin Island. Starbuck (1878), p.168. The fishery slowly began to expand, with whalers visiting the West Africa|west coast of Africa in 1763, the Azores in 1765, the coast of Brazil in 1773, and the Falklands in 1774.

Nantucket

The island of Nantucket's beginnings in western history can possibly be traced to its conjectured sighting by Norsemen in the 11th century. In 1602 Captain Bartholomew Gosnold of Suffolk from Falmouth, Cornwall, England sailed his bark Concord past the bluffs of Siasconset.

The island's original inhabitants, the Wampanoag Native Americans in the United States|Indians, lived undisturbed until 1641 when the island was deeded by the English (the authorities in control of all land from the coast of Maine to New York) to Thomas Mayhew and his son, merchants of Watertown and Martha's Vineyard. Nantucket was part of Dukes County, New York|Dukes County, New York until 1691, when it was transferred to the newly formed Province of Massachusetts Bay and split off to form Nantucket County. The entire area of the New York county had been purchased by Thomas Mayhew (governor)|Thomas Mayhew Sr. of Watertown, Massachusetts|Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1641, buying out competing land claims. The earliest English settlement in the area began on neighboring island Martha's Vineyard, named after Bartholomew's daughter Martha who died on board, en route.

As Europeans began to settle Cape Cod, the island became a place of refuge for regional Indians, as Nantucket was not yet settled by Europeans. The growing population of Native Americans welcomed seasonal groups of Indians who traveled to the island to fish and later harvest whales that washed up on shore.

Coffin, Levi. Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad: Being a Brief History of the Labors of a Lifetime in Behalf of the Slave, with the Stories of Numerous Fugitives, Who Gained Their Freedom Through His Instrumentality, and Many Other Incidents. Cincinnati: R. Clarke & Co, 1880. Print. *find in a library

The Geni Master Profile

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Colonial America: Nantucket, Massachusetts After 1789: Nantucket, Massachusetts, United States

Overview tab

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Coffin, Allen “The Coffin family : the life of Tristram Coffyn, of Nantucket, Mass., founder of the family line in America; together with reminiscences and anecdotes of some of his numerous descendants, and some historical information concerning the ancient families named Coffyn” (1881) [http://www.archive.org/stream/coffinfamilylife00coff#page/n5/mode/2up]